Walter Ulbricht

Walter Ulbricht (30 June 1893-1 August 1973) was the First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany from 25 July 1950 to 3 May 1971, succeeding Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl and preceding Erich Honecker.

Biography
Walter Ulbricht was born in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany on 30 June 1893, and he worked as a joiner. He became a member of the SPD in 1912 and the KPD upon its foundation in 1919, whose leadership he joined in 1923. After a brief period in Soviet Russia he became a member of the Parliament of Saxony from 1926 to 1928, and in 1928 he became an MP until the Nazi ban on the KPD following the Reichstag fire in 1933. He emigrated first to France and then to the Soviet Union, where he was groomed for the role he was to take up after the war when he returned to Soviet-occupied East Germany at the head of the "Ulbricht Group" to reform the KPD. In 1946, he became one of the moving spirits behind a unification of the SPD and the KPD. Even though the first East German president was Wilhelm Pieck and the first Prime Minister was Otto Grotewohl, the real power in the new East Germany lay with Ulbricht, owing to his connections with the Soviet Union. He became the Communist Party leader in 1950, replaced Pieck in 1960 with the office of President of the State Council, and became Chairman of the Defense Council in the same year. Under Ulbricht, the Communist Party gained a very strong hold over East German society, a fact which contributed significantly to the stability of East Germany relative to its Eastern European neighbors until the mid-1980s. During his last years in office, he tried to steer a slightly more independent course from that of the Soviet Union, which contributed to his replacement by Erich Honecker. He died two years later at the age of 80.